ENTRY DESCRIPTION
DUFFY

“My old man’s passed away,” Duffy declared to us. “Everyone’s passed away. My grandmother’s passed away. She outlived her kids. I wouldn’t like that! … But she still had her mind.” But despite the fact that Duffy, seemingly, has fond memories of his family, it seems that all was not well with his relationship with them. “I was a ward of the court at four,” he told us sadly. “I’ve been on my own since four.”
Duffy, who is 58-years-old, was born and raised in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). “I was born in York, the first capital of Canada,” he told us with a note of pride in his voice. However, he grew up in Brampton. “It was 30,000 when I moved there in ’64!” he said excitedly. “Thirty thousand people!” Duffy has travelled the country from coast to coast. When asked what his least favourite place to visit was, he replied, “I’d say the toughest city is Winnipeg, Canada … This is a tough city here. Hamilton’s a tough city.” When asked what his favourite place to visit was, he said, “Actually, it was the Rocky Mountains.”
When we met Duffy he was sitting on a bench, just down the road from the Booth Centre, chatting with his friend Mike. Later Mike said of his friend, “He’s the nicest guy. He’d give you the shirt off his back!”

AUTHOR
Leah Denbok is a 17-year-old grade 12 student at Collingwood Collegiate Institute. For the past four years the Leah has been mentored by the National Geographic photographer and Fellow Joel Sartore. When Leah was only 14-years-old, Joel said of Leah, "If she sticks with it I think she is well on her way to becoming not just a good photographer but a great photographer. And I'm not kidding." This past August Leah was invited to exhibit her photography at Christ Church Cathedral during the Supercrawl event in Hamilton. Afterwards, the internationally known street photography, Alex Zafer, posted a comment on Facebook in which he said of Leah, "This is a young woman with an obviously high EQ, mega talent, and a terrific eye for humanizing homeless people on the streets who are so often looked upon, or looked-over as subhuman." After graduating from high school Leah intends to study photojournalism at university.











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